As storage technology improves, disk drives continue to become smaller and denser. In addition, various different disk drive storage technologies exist, for example Fibre Channel and SATA. Storage systems therefore continue to be re-designed in order to take advantage of the small, denser drives to provide systems offering larger amounts of storage space. Storage systems are also storage technology dependent, so different systems must be designed depending upon the disk drive technology used.
Disk drive densities have been rapidly increasing, but density increases are now slowing as technology limits are approached. Storage systems designers cannot therefore simply rely on density increases in order to provide increased storage space. Designers will need to find other means of increasing storage space.
In the meantime, for most uses to which such storage systems are put, it is very important that they be highly reliable so that critical data is not lost. “Highly available” storage systems are provided for this reason. High availability is provided, for example, by duplicating data across disks, and by making sure that cached data can be written back to disks in the event of a failure.
It would be advantageous to provide a storage system architected to take advantage of various different types of disk drive technologies and densities, and architected in a highly available manner.